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I was idly browsing through various blogs and news sites this morning and I was struck by how many stories involve people working very hard at no benefit to themselves in order to hurt other people. Poisoning girls’ schools in Afghanistan, stripping away women’s rights in Egypt, making homosexuality a crime in too many countries to count.

I can understand why the leaders of these things do it, for example Mitt Romney declaring opposition to marriage equality will make him more likely to get elected. What I don’t get is the masses, the individual people who work really hard on these things and don’t seem to get any benefit other than the dubious joy of causing human suffering. Seriously.

The most common explanations for these things are religious, and I still don’t get it. Okay, so your religion says X is a sin, but unless your religion also says you should be cruel to people who commit sin or are sinful by nature, why spend so much of your precious time and energy on it?

Pastor Charles Worley went full-nazi and said that gays should be rounded up and put in concentration camps. Bizarrely, he seems to think after they die of old age there won’t be any more. Not sure if he believes that “recruiting” crap or if he thinks they’re actually a different species. Think of the scale of that project, the cruelty it would impose on tens of millions of people. Read the rest of this entry →

So in the morning I saw this and I’ve been trying to work out what to say about it all day. Mississippi state representative Bubba Carpenter is bragging that he’s stopped abortion in that state, at least for the moment. I’m going to quote him a bit.

And of course, there you have the other side. They’re like, ‘Well, the poor pitiful women that can’t afford to go out of state are just going to start doing them at home with a coat hanger.’ That’s what we’ve heard over and over and over.

But hey, you have to have moral values. You have to start somewhere, and that’s what we’ve decided to do.

Moral values. This shithead is proudly bragging about poor women in desperation getting injured and bleeding and dying with full knowledge that those who can afford it will still get abortions, and he has the audacity to claim it’s moral.

You know what I think? I think it’s the same casual cruelty you see in schoolyard bullies. I’ll bet he even has an obnoxious laugh just for those occasions when he’s making people suffer for his own amusement, “Haw haw I sure fucked things up for them!”, feeling that little thrill of power that comes from hurting those weaker than him.

A friend sent me this link, calling it “blog fodder”. I guess that much is true, but sometimes you read something and just want to kill the messenger.

Georgia passed the “Women as Livestock” bill. I had to check the date on that, but it says March 31 so I guess there’s not much hope that it’s just a very bad April fools prank. It bans all abortions past 20 weeks. There was a slight concession made for cases when the fetus was dead, not expected to survive, or likely to kill or physically injure the woman. What she wants, how she feels about things, her own pain and suffering? Irrelevant, they aren’t addressed at all. She’s just a vessel, nobody cares about her wishes.

For extra fun, they stipulate that during an abortion procedure the fetus must emerge alive. Seriously, these shitheads give us the bullshit line of “fetal pain”, and then set up the law to cause as much as possible.

By now you may have heard about this week’s Doonesbury storyline, the one that many newspapers aren’t publishing. Here’s a link to the beginning of it, you can click on the strip itself to see a larger image. Just click through and read it.

All done? Good, now read this actual account of an actual woman going through that actual nightmare. Especially if you’re Texan, Republican, or male, don’t make excuses, fucking read it. Imagine it, try to visualize going through that. Imagine someone you love having to do that. Read the rest of this entry →

I’d meant to just toss that video up with a short paragraph and call it a day for blogging, but I foolishly clicked a link I saw on Twitter. I’m going to quote the bit that made me too angry to do anything more productive than this.

Asserting conscientious objections, nurses in New Jersey have said they would not check the vital signs of patients recovering from abortions.

I want to make it crystal fucking clear what I’m seeing here. I’m seeing that nurses, people who are well-trained professionals in taking care of sick or injured people, will not make the basic checks necessary for the safety and well-being of their patient if they don’t like the procedure that patient is in for. And they’re calling it a decision of “conscience”, apparently without irony.

Busy day for Occupy Wall Street, lots going on. Twitter’s #OWS tag was very active, and yet never trended. Meanwhile, “Women Who Don’t Cook” was a trending topic, with predictable depressing shit being said. Well, fuck. Between that and the truly ugly things opponents of Occupy were saying, I’m feeling a little down.

Look, people disagree on things. sometimes passionately, sometimes even violently, and it’s easy to get angry when someone disagrees with you on something that seems so obvious to you. It’s important not to let anger blind you to the fact that your opponents are still people. Maybe they’re misinformed, maybe they’re stupid, maybe they’re selfish or maybe it’s something else entirely, maybe even they’re right and you’re the one who’s wrong, it really doesn’t matter. They’re still people, and if you dehumanize them, you’re becoming a bit of a monster yourself.

Worse, you’re opening yourself up to the worst kinds of manipulation, where someone can convince you to commit real atrocities. Because how bad can it be? It’s not like they’re asking you to do anything to actual people.

People matter. All of them. How rich or poor they are, what religion they claim, the politics they espouse, the color of their skin, the clothes they like to wear and the sex they like to have, all these things are irrelevant. Even the worst of us matter, we’re all in this together. You don’t have to like them, you don’t have to be nice to them, but when you forget that they’re people, when you start to see them as just obstacles, then what are you becoming?